I finished VIII and my thoughts remain the same - it's perfectly fine, the weakest of the PS1 trilogy but still solid and a lot of the hate has been overblown. I mentioned in the last post how the collective amnesia is bad writing, but the other issue it leads to is that all the characters are almost the same age and have the same life experience. Aside from Squall and Rinoa, none of them have anything to do or any character arc beyond disc 1 either, like how Seifer has a redemption arc, except it skips the part where he commits the act that redeems him. I'm not sure if the implications of the gardens raising child soldiers really occurred to them either.
Despite all that, it still would have been nice to have a proper remaster, but I can't imagine Square Enix will ever be that interested. Seems telling that in the Ultimania Archive it gets 68 pages, whilst VII gets 112 and IX 125.